


The Light Most Visible

by akdaley



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Flash Fic, Jedi Training, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Kylo Ren Redemption, Short, Snippet, The Force, The Light, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 04:51:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13403844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akdaley/pseuds/akdaley
Summary: A short romantic snippet, or perhaps a teaser, from the longer fic I am writing (I've Not Been Feeling Quite Like Myself). Rey and Kylo do some Jedi literary analysis.





	The Light Most Visible

**Author's Note:**

> This scene won't make it into my other story in this form as it no longer fits with the narrative. The basic idea might be there, but this will have to be deleted. So I thought I'd post it as a standalone Reylo moment. This is about as fluffy as I get!

He’s reading her a passage from the book they’re working on. He knows the text well. He studied it with his uncle nearly every day for two years; if there’s anything he knows it’s this book. Coming back to it has been like meeting an old classmate, someone you were forced into an intimate and deep acquaintance with at some distant, near-vanished part of your former life. He  _knows_ this text. 

So he's very certain that they’re coming to a part that he doesn’t like. He's known they're edging towards this verse for a while now, and he's been avoiding the way that idea makes him feel, because within the verse comes a complexity, an acknowledgement, that he doesn't want to have face.

_The light that is inside you is visible to all. Yet you will never see or know the light that is truly your own._

'I don’t understand it,' Rey says. They are beyond the point where bluntness matters; they have so little time. 

'It means that you can’t see the good things about yourself,' Kylo says. 'They’re only true through other people seeing them. You can’t look for your own goodness. You have to look for it in others rather than yourself.'

He gives her a slightly rueful look. 'I think. That's how I was taught it, anyway.'

'You’re not comfortable teaching this,' she says.

'No.'

'Why not?'

Her pose is lithe; she is moving through a form that accompanies the verse. Light breathed in and out, Light through her body's movement, orchestrated in it. Light everywhere, visible to him, but not to her, just like it says. He can see her so brightly, with such desperate clarity. She aches with Light. He is teaching her a form that he has no right to see, he thinks. He is letting her be taken over by Light; who is he to teach her?

'There’s not too much that’s good in me,' he says. 'If I can’t find it in myself, and other people can’t see it in me, then I don’t know if it really exists. I thought about that a lot. When I was younger.'

She gives him the benefit of one of her most radiant smiles.

'But I can see it,' she says.

He's thought about this conversation in his head. He's pictured her saying it, he's wanted her to say it; desperately wanted it. He has craved for someone to see what he only half-believes is there - his own inner light. That mutilated, near-extinguished, battered and infinitely precious core of being that he thinks, dares to believe, might still look just a little bit like she does. Just a glimmer of whatever's left. 

The Jedi say he'll never be able to see it in himself. He's has to wait for someone else to find it.

'I’m not a good person,' he says.

She shrugs her shoulders. 'Kylo Ren wasn’t a good person.'

This is the part that he doesn't like. They're almost there.

'It’s not that simple,' he says. 'You think that I can be separated out into different parts but only one of them is true. Or that there's one bit underneath, and that's the most true of all. But that’s not it. I’m all of the people I pretend to be. I am Kylo Ren, and Ben Solo. It’s not a mask, Rey. It’s not just that.'

'I know,' she says. 'It's not just that'.

Do you?  He holds out his hand for her to take, and she stretches forward into the touch, leaning her body into him, graceful and serene. 

'I don’t know how to separate them', he says. 'I never have.'

'Kylo,' she says, and she’s smiling again. 'Ben. You’re always so complicated. You forget that one thing can have multiple faces, but that doesn't mean it's not whole.'

Together, they move into a new form, reached out towards the Light that is in everything, including themselves. He's waited so long for someone to see it.

'Isn’t all of this really pretty simple?' she says. 'One being. Whatever name you call them by, deep down, isn't it all really just one person?'

Then she’s kissing him, and her lips are soft and warm, and insistently beautiful.

She tastes just like forgiveness, he thinks. Just exactly like that.


End file.
